Pwn-Fest continues despite Superfreaks PR spin attempts

BPSDB Why the on-going fascination with the error filled climate change chapter in Superfreakonomics? Quite simple really, it’s a rare opportunity to get some anecdotal evidence on whether the climate science blogosphere has an impact, what kind of impact, and how much. This particular issue is valuable in that it has spilled over into the more public realm while still clearly ‘tagged’ as Superfreakonomics.

Naturally anecdotal evidence is far less than what we could wish for, but at least it is something. A sputtering match is still better than the usual darkness that we fumble around in.

Oh yes, there is also a link to where you can read the climate chapter if you haven’t yet and still want to ….

So I have been spending far too much of my life looking at blogs, reviews, and news stories which I will not be inflicting on you (why should you suffer too?). Nor am I even going to guess at how many, because frankly it’s a blur. Instead I will just offer some impressions of what I found.

The attempts to spin the book are interesting in that, other than the most brain deadclimate change Deniers, for the most part no one is attempting to directly defend the chapter as accurate per se. Instead the defences seem to be taking two main forms, one Red Herring fallacy, the other a Straw Man Fallacy, both subsets of the larger Red Herring fallacy.

The framing of this spin goes along the lines of ‘it’s just a pop culture book, so what does it matter? why get so worked up?’ The correct question is “does it matter?”, but in this instance the framing of the question is the spin. By prefixing the question with the dismissive “it’s just a …” one is led towards concluding that it doesn’t matter.

Does it matter? will the book influence what people believe?

Obvious alerts!:

it already has influenced what some people believe, as any internet search will tell you;

more people read pop culture books than the scientific literature, or even popular science media (well … duh);

the iconic fame of the Superfreaks means they are particularly influential relative to even most pop culture media;

if people weren’t influenced by ill-informed and fraudulent sources (aka the Denialosphere) we would already have dealt with climate change because everyone would know the facts, and we climate bloggers could go out and have lives.

Basically the attempt is made to frame the “uproar” and criticism as being about the book being “controversial” (this is the one used in The Daily Show puff piece). The fact of the book being error ridden nonsense is completely ignored while trying to frame the authors as bold visionaries and the science community as petty, myopic reactionaries (pathologically obsessed with trivialities like facts, accuracy and truth?).

Speaking of flawed logic, this one is also a Bulverism as it takes as a given that the SuperFreaks are right, which is the very thing they most need to demonstrate.

It is an insidious spin in that the average person will think that they now understand the reason for the criticism and will look no further to check whether this is true. Undoubtedly most of the self-styled “skeptics” will uncritically swallow this line without a shred of doubt about it’s accuracy.

As such it is necessary to keep the pressure on and do everything possible to get the facts out there. People need to know that it does matter, and it is not a case of Galileo vs calcified orthodoxy, but rather Beavis and Butthead vs reality.

Simon Donner covers part of this in The message or the messenger, noting that some of the narratives drifted into discussions of personalities rather than climate science and the accuracy of the book. In a sense both of the first two spin attempts are sub-sets of this one in that they try to make the “story” about something else,

These tactics are effective when they go unchallenged, which is the norm. As such it is important stay on message and make sure that discussions are about climate science and the accuracy of the book, period.

Despite these, there is still lots of good coverage as well. Some updates of the SuperFreaks being Pwned by:

Enviroknow

But perhaps this was all just a clever marketing ploy. I can’t help but wonder if chapter five was deliberately crafted to cause an uproar. Some sort of hail mary attempt to draw attention to an otherwise less-than-spectacular book. If this is the case — and you truly have adopted the ‘all news is good news’ mantra — then I guess congratulations are in order. Your book is almost as relevant as the balloon boy.

Interesting suggestion about it being a deliberate ploy, but I doubt it is the case. The authors seem genuinely dumfounded about the ruckus, apparently unaware that the reason everyone is saying that the chapter is shoddy nonsense is because the chapter really is shoddy nonsense. They seem to have believed (still do?) it was a legitimate contribution to the climate discussion … absurd as that sounds.

As of this writing you can still find a copy of the climate change chapter at Enviroknow.

Follow me, after fold, for a look at these 22 flaws. [Editor’s note: This represents a flaw every 42 words. Flaws per word is an interesting metric for opinion pieces (and, well, anti-science syndrome suffering ‘studies’) that could merit future and further use.] [Emphasis added]

Pwned!!!

Deltoid (again)

I have a suggestion for a nicely controversial chapter in their next book, Hyperfreakonomics. Advocate that instead of treating type 2 diabetes with diet and exercise, people should avoid the bother of exercise and changing their diet and just inject insulin. When doctors object to this advice, respond that you are just calmly and logically answering the question: “How can we efficiently control blood sugar levels” while your critics are hung up on moral questions like “How can we keep this person healthy”.

I am going to have to disagree with Lambert that the real howler here is NOT the suggestion that climate scientists are ignorant rubes who think the Earth is flat, but rather it is Levitt and Dubner’s delusions of adequacy that they are somehow the modern Galileos who got it right.

The former premise is merely absurd and idiotic, whereas the latter goes well beyond that.

and more …

While the following posts don’t add any particularly new information to the story as it has already been covered on this blog (here, here and here) there are some nice bon mots out there, so I have to tip my hat to:

DeSmogBlog

” … we’d like to add our voice to those who are disappointed by the clumsy unprofessionalism of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book … just because someone is good at Trivial Pursuit doesn’t mean they’ll be a reliable scientist … It’s the kind of blather that superannuated old contrarians (stand up Feeman Dyson) spout in order to entertain themselves at dinner … “

Newsweek

The Guardian

Not about the climate chapter, but Prostitution, for fun and profit notes that “The men behind Freakonomics offer a stunningly shallow and flawed view of sex work as a career option for women“

It seems the climate chapter is not the only one that was “stunningly shallow and flawed.” (thanks to Richard Pauli for the heads up).

DenialDepot

As ever Denial Depot seeks to shatter Poe’s Law and be even more absurd and idiotic than what they parody … you judge whether they managed it this time SuperDuperFreakonomics.

on Amazon

“Levitt and Dubner cheapen their thinking by presenting a few dozen pages that are littered with obvious mistakes and even the perpetuation of myths, … the whole thing is a shame. An eye sore in what could have otherwise been a fun book.“

Despite the relatively good job the climate blogs have done to get the word out there the spin is also proving fairly effective. Far too many of the sites I looked at were indulging in the versions of the spin described above. We need to keep getting the message out.

To that end please make an effort to take some action as discussed in this post, and note that as the last pwn illustrates, book reviews matter. As do comments on book reviews and on other forums.

If you can, post a book review somewhere, or make a comment on a review, post links to your favourite critiques of the book, vote up the intelligent reviews, articles and comments, get the facts out there and pwn the Superfreaks!

“Over the 20th century, ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic main development region warmed during peak hurricane season, with the most pronounced warming occurring over the last four decades.” Earth Gauge

35 Responses

[…] The attempts to spin the book are interesting in that, other than the most brain dead climate change Deniers, for the most part no one is attempting to directly defend the chapter as accurate per se. Instead the defences seem to be taking two main forms, one Red Herring fallacy, the other a Straw Man Fallacy, both subsets of the larger Red Herring fallacy. via greenfyre.wordpress.com […]

that’s a good blog, Greenfyre (but if you want to investigate “whether the climate science blogosphere has an impact”, sources like Deltoid or DeSmogBlog won’t help 8-) )

You know as a cynical long-time UK resident I am on the side you classify as “red herring”. Let’s explore the various points:

1. it already has influenced what some people believe, as any internet search will tell you

I think the real question should be…has the book made anybody change their mind? Not sure. It is not even good for an AGW skeptic, as L&D’s conclusion is to shoot sulphur in the stratosphere (a matter against which eg I am ready to demonstrate).

2. more people read pop culture books than the scientific literature, or even popular science media (well … duh)

If that is a concern, then it should also be a concern to organize public debates, where the public would find itself engaged…a matter whose usefulness you are not convinced of

3. the iconic fame of the Superfreaks means they are particularly influential relative to even most pop culture media

On the other hand, the steady stream of self-help books constantly available, from how to get rich to how to get slim, means very few people succeed at getting rich, or getting slim (otherwise there won’t be any need for more books).

In other words, the practical consequences of “pop culture media” are ephemeral at best. To double-check that…are you aware of any law enacted anywhere, or change in habit, after and because of the Freakonomics book?

4. if people weren’t influenced by ill-informed and fraudulent sources (aka the Denialosphere) we would already have dealt with climate change because everyone would know the facts, and we climate bloggers could go out and have lives

You don’t actually believe that, do you?
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If you think the book is such a total waste of time that has no impact you should post on the Superfreaks site and spare them the effort of writing another one.

I repeat, if you think these media have no effect at all, why do you blog?

Off topic:
Mike, I really like how you do your best to characterize opposing arguments by their fallacies. Could you help me a little? For a long time I’ve been bugged by not being able to find a neat category for the following argument, which I think is in a subset of ad-hominem somewhere, although the argument seems very common.

I was arguing with a group of commenters about tobacco control, and many of them kept questioning why I wasn’t more concerned, or didn’t do more, to fight against, for example, pollution from car exhaust. Their point was that, because I wasn’t out campaigning for tighter car-exhaust control legislation (and, of course, they just assumed I wasn’t, without ever asking me) that whatever I had to say about tobacco could be disregarded.

I looked around a lot back in the day, but couldn’t find a name for this particular line of attack, even though, as I said, I think it’s very common.
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Very common is right. Further, it is almost never used by anyone who is trying to do some good in the world, it is almost exclusively the obsession of the self-absorbed.

That being said, it’s a form of red herring, but which one? Some sort of false priority or some such. Regardless of the formal name, the false logic is that there is some sort of objective standard of “importance”, when in fact what one works on will depend on any number of factors.

Regardless, it will be here somewhere. If I think of it, I’ll let you know. If you find it, please let me know.

In the meantime, immediately switch to giving a hard time about whatever they suggested you should be concerned with and be utterly brutal about it ;)

2. Having looked in Wikipedia, I think Klortho’s experience might be the red-herring called a “tu quoque” [2]

3. You ask “if you think these media have no effect at all, why do you blog“. You’re generalizing: the original point was not about disregarding L&D altogether, rather if there has been an over-reaction to their book. [3]

It’s against the over-reaction that Superfreakonomics is apparently (to me, at least) not worth the overall effort to undermine it. “Don’t shoot rocket-propelled grenades at mosquitoes” doesn’t mean one should avoid using more proper ways to deal with the insects.
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[1] Fixed, thanks

[2] I think you may be right in the sense that the claim is made of inconsistency about something assumed rather than necessarily real, ie ‘if you cared about air quality you would, but you don’t, so you don’t care, therefore …’. More convoluted than a standard Ad Hominem Tu Quoque, but it sounds right.

[3] In attempting to make your case you have been very absolute and I have replied in kind. For a more nuanced answer you will need to make a more nuanced argument. Look again at what you say and be clear about what constitutes and over-reaction vs what you believe to be an appropriately scaled response.

Just poking around again a little, and found here and here a couple of things suggesting that ad hominems are not always fallacious — something I’ve noticed before but never read. Combined with bayesian reasoning, ad hominem can be effective and relevant. Consider, for example, if you know someone is a compulsive liar, then the fact that he/she asserts something adds little or no credibility to the assertion. [3]

> love/hate?
Exactly [4]
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[1] I am actually inclined to agree with Om; tu quoque is not necessarily about doing the “same thing”, but rather inconsistency, and that is the claim.

[2] Awesome, isn’t it

[3] No, a fallacy is always a fallacy, easily illustrated.
i) Nomen is a liar, he always lies, has never been known to tell the truth.
ii) Nomen says 2+2=4
iii) is Nomen’s statement ii) true or not?

Every argument MUST be dealt with on the basis of the argument itself. Thus even though we know that Singer, Ball, Carter etc seem to fit the description of Nomen, you still have to how show each given argument is wrong.

Their history means that it is pretty much a given that what they say is wrong, and you do well to begin with that assumption, but you still MUST show how it is wrong.

> Every argument MUST be dealt with on
> the basis of the argument itself

Yes but you can do that up to a point…otherwise every troll in the world will always have a field day… [1]

Let’s say that a person repeatedly found at fault builds a reputation so that their truthfulness in the future needs to be just a tad stronger in order to be accepted. Extraordinary claims and all that. [2]
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[1]
1) I differentiate the rules of logic vs the practicality of living. How you deal with a particular situation is a call each person has to make, but unless you refute the argument, you haven’t refuted the argument;

2) In climate, the Denier Canon has been refuted, so the refutation may take the form of simply providing a link to the many sites that expose the claim as a gibberish and it qualifies as a refutation.

You are not the only one believing there is such a thing as a “Denier Canon” and admittedly the Heartland Institute has been working towards that.

But I find that expression an oxymoron, especially if we accept a (militant) definition of “Denier” so general as to include a blog like mine, built from an acceptance of CO2-based warming but dedicated to shoot down “mainstream” exaggerations and political hijackings of climate science that have little to do with Science and in my humble opinion will come around biting hard against the whole environmental movement, with grave damage for the environment.

I also give space to fringe ideas that might, just might provide a bit of additional knowledge regarding the Earth’s climate (and why not?).

I find myself sitting well outside the Watts/McIntyre/Morano/Monckton/HI circuit, and yet you have classified my blog as “Denier” (quite ironically, not noticing that if I was the only “Denier” mentioning the Pilmer brouhaha, perhaps there was something wrong in defining me a “Denier”…).

Oh well. Let’s see if we can talk about this in the future.
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Rather than argue the term just be rational, coherent, relevant, and fact based (ie a skeptic) and the whole issue is completely irrelevant to you.

Or rather, your concern should be exposing the Deniers for what they are, which is most certainly not skeptics.

The term is more redundant than an oxymoron insomuch as the nonsense the Deniers believe are irrational gibberish and taken on faith.

Eh? Maurizio claims not to be a denier? And yet he compares AGW to Lysenkoism! He claims “mainstream scientists” are still discussing “attribution”. Sorry, mate, mainstream scientists are NOT discussing attribution, they are at best discussing the finer details of attribution. Is it 90% human CO2 emissions, or 85%?
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True, but whether it were all, or merely one member of the scientific community, it boils down to who has the most credible evidence. It’s the only thing that matters.

If you do not want to discuss attribution, then I have no way to reply, as we are way off topic in this particular blog. I can leave you to your certitudes for now, but it’d be wiser in the future not to mention something you do not want to talk about.

It’s nice to know real scientists doing real work are not afraid to discuss attribution though.

I agree that all that matters is who has the most credible evidence. But that’s not what Maurizio is saying on his blog and what I reacted to. He claims mainstream scientists are still discussing attribution (and in the sense of no human influence, little human influence, mostly human, and almost exclusively human). It’s actually the fringe scientists that are still discussing attribution, challenging the mainstream scientists.

As we can clearly see from his frequent posts, when he attempts the topic of science, he minimizes the crisis and pretends scientists don’t know what they know, and don’t know enough to call it a crisis. He misunderstands which questions in the science still need to be addressed and which ones do not.

As omnologos himself explains on his own blog, he feels deniers McIntyre and Watts have already satisfactorily explained the current state of climate change science i.e., the ‘beliefs’ of the ‘greenies’ and ‘warmists’, so he feels it is a contribution to the literature to take a cosmopolitan approach, which has apparently led him to searching international newspapers and magazines for ‘reports’ that he believes support his type of denial.

Much, if not most, of what he chooses to report from other countries and in other languages is indeed off the beaten path of the actual science and either leads right back to the usual denialosphere suspects or can be shown to be a glaring misrepresentation by omnologos of the actual science-based information.

He posts “The fabled IPCC reports thread tentatively on the matter of present evidence of global warming” “The temperature readings are still in ranges that can be easily reverted by relatively modest volcanic eruptions” “There is no modeller predicting disasters at the current level of CO2 concentration”, and for you, Marco, “Global Warming Attribution (attribution of changes and/or warming to human activities, that is) is still up in the air” All in the same post.

Oh, and also in the same post, “Greenfyre is a good guy, only excessively fired up on his greenie quest. He doesn’t strike me like a lost cause of the likes of Monbiot or Schmidt, rather a person I could have lunch with”.

Omno-troll, calling a spade a spade is not off topic. You are both anti-science syndrome sufferer and an AGW denier, You libel and slander climate scientists and encourage your followers to be even more vitriolic in their posts ala a certain McIntyre.

It is no wonder that scientists treat you with the scorn that you deserve.

We will not move on since you are an embarrassment to scientists everywhere. We will not allow anti-science nonsense to be propagated.

Ian – Greenfyre had specifically asked you to refrain from this behaviour. And yet you’re back as if nothing had happened. You’ll soon fully qualify as spammer.

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Going back to Marths: I can think of a slight misunderstanding in the way blogs work. They are not books with a coherent start and end argument. They are “web logs”, notes written during one’s journey (through climate science, in this case).

We could go back and re-examine every word I uttered who knows when, and try to understand why I said it, what I actually meant, what pushed me into saying it, etc etc.

That would be a huge boost for my ego, but I am afraid of extremely little interest to anybody not called Martha or Ian (or Marco). And wholly off-topic in a Greenfyre blog.

There is nothing preventing you from posting comments into my blogs if you are so much interested. For everybody else, let’s try to communicate and allow ourselves “to be judged on what we are saying right now rather than past behaviour”, as somebody else has said in these blogs.

Never mind that the link to my “denier web site” takes you to “omnologos”, my generalist web site. And as for my avatar…you don’t really want me to log out of WordPress every time before posting comments here, do you?

This conversation has grown too silly. You remind me of the guy that has just accused me of being paid by Exxon because I share the same blogging platform with Anthony Watts (and that’s WordPress, where Greenfyre’s blog and countless others are hosted as well).

‘We will not move on since you are an embarrassment to scientists everywhere’

Ian, you have a way of getting right to the point. And funny, too. :-)

omnologos
I appreciate how your comments about Greenfyre are embarrassing for you and one perhaps needs to save face.

Sadly, I see no evidence of a journey. If it’s true, feel free to replace your recent, willful misrepresentations and lies from, say, the Greenfyre’s science thread. It should be replace with something that minimally respects honest discussion. You make a childish game of all interaction.

Ian’s frustration is more than understandable.

p.s. You should apologize to Greenfyre. And the public. For what? For your persistent past and ongoing spamming of sites with your recycled (but admittedly sometimes unique) lies and frauds, never mind the denier crap littered all over your own site. It matters. On the other hand, something as trivial as the spelling of my name, has you apologizing? Get a grip.

[…] pages and blog posts have been filled with Steven Levitt’s and Steven Dubner’s shallow, truthiness-laden Superfreakonomics. The continued attention feeds on itself, as ignoring the deceptions and the mediocre […]

[…] pages, and blog posts have been filled with Steven Levitt’s and Steven Dubner’s shallow, truthiness-laden Superfreakonomics. And, there is a challenge here: do you ignore the deception in the book, so as not to give more […]

[…] op-ed pages, and blog posts have been filled with Steven Levitt's and Steven Dubner's shallow, truthiness-laden Superfreakonomics. And there is a challenge here: do you ignore the deception in the book, so as not to give more […]

[…] So I have been spending far too much of my life looking at blogs, reviews, and news stories which I will not be inflicting on you (why should you suffer too?). Nor am I even going to guess at how many, because frankly it’s a blur. Instead I will just offer some impressions of what I found.The attempts to spin the book are interesting in that, other than the most brain dead climate change Deniers, for the most part no one is attempting to directly defend the chapter as accurate per se. Instead the defences seem to be taking two main forms, one Red Herring fallacy, the other a Straw Man Fallacy, both subsets of the larger Red Herring fallacy. via greenfyre.wordpress.com […]

[…] So I have been spending far too much of my life looking at blogs, reviews, and news stories which I will not be inflicting on you (why should you suffer too?). Nor am I even going to guess at how many, because frankly it’s a blur. Instead I will just offer some impressions of what I found.The attempts to spin the book are interesting in that, other than the most brain dead climate change Deniers, for the most part no one is attempting to directly defend the chapter as accurate per se. Instead the defences seem to be taking two main forms, one Red Herring fallacy, the other a Straw Man Fallacy, both subsets of the larger Red Herring fallacy. via greenfyre.wordpress.com […]